through the first handgun she had ever fired. The explosion was terrible, even inside her pocket, and the man flew backwards a few feet before skidding on his back. The spent casing fell onto her hand and burned her. She jerked her hand from the pocket and shook it up and down.
The man lay prone on his back. He had been nude under the trench coat; his body covered in shallow lacerations, a crisscrossing pattern of self-abuse, but now with a neat smoking black hole in his upper chest. He had left behind his fillet knife and one shoe, still standing where she had shot him.
She pulled the gun from her pocket and then the empty casing. She released the magazine and added another round to it before putting it back into the gun. She wanted to make sure she kept the thing loaded until she was out of here. Then she would bury it somewhere so no one could say she killed this man; accuse her of murder even though she was just protecting herself.
“Hey! Up here!”
Shannon spun around and saw a man in the window of a large building some many yards away. She raised the gun and pointed it at him, and he ducked immediately. “I had to! He was going to kill me!” she screamed desperately.
“I know,” came the reply over the edge of the window. “I saw the whole thing. Can you get me out of here? I’m getting hungry and there are no nurses up here.”
“You’re in a hospital?” she asked after her heart slowed its hammering pace and she gained control of her breath again.
“Yeah, sort of… Can you come and let me out? The door is locked!”
“Why are you locked in?” Shannon asked as she approached the building.
“They thought I was crazy, but then they tore their own town apart.” The man peeked over the sill again.
“Are you crazy?”
“No, I know what I saw, and it’s the same thing that’s going on around here. They just didn’t know about it. I tried to tell them, and they locked me in here.”
“You know what’s going on then?”
“Not exactly, but I think my friends and I started it. Come let me out, please?”
“What are you going to do if I let you out?”
“Get the flaming fuck out of this town, that’s what! Please?” he pleaded.
“What’s your name?”
“Ethan.”
“Alright, Ethan, I’ll come up—but I will have some questions for you before I let you out.”
“That’s fine. Do you have any food with you?”
“We will worry about that after I get you out. Here I come…”
“Hey, what’s your name?”
“Shannon.”
“Nice to meet you, Shannon, and thank you!”
She walked along the side of the building searching for the entrance to the hospital. She was not sure who this guy was, but if he had any answers to what was going on, maybe he knew who she was, maybe he could help her remember. At a minimum, she could talk to him from a safe distance.
Chapter 23
Shannon found the entrance of the hospital, which was now shattered and broken, blood dried along the glass. Bodies littered the entry way, torn and battered during their flight. A stench began to rise from them, mixing with the air of decay and the faint smell of something sweet and rancid burning somewhere distant. Shannon decided that somewhere close by were the very gates of Hell.
The remains of a young nurse, no more than twenty, lay across the pressure switch of the large automatic doors, holding them open. The girl was clearly raped much like Shannon, but beyond that, she was dismembered and laid open across her mid-section, lengths of her intestines draped across her naked body like some ornament. Shannon shuddered and gritted her teeth, fighting back the sudden urge to wretch the nothing she had eaten. It had become clear to her that last night could have seen herself much like this young nurse, and she wondered if she were going insane.
Shannon worked her way around the nurse and entered the lobby of the upscale hospital, which now was a scene of soulless violence. Many corpses lay scattered about, all cut neatly into pieces, each piece placed in a pattern around the host corpse. The entrails of most draped along the walls like some hellish semblance of art, and dried blood sat frozen in mid drip, forming patterns of gore on the walls and the reception desk.
Shannon came to a short stop, shocked with the brutality and violence, the utter disregard for life or even the sanctity of a corpse. Every fiber of her being urged her to leave, to run from this place, this abomination of a hospital, and get as far away as she could. Deep inside her, in the hollow places not hidden by the thick velvety blanket, she knew that leaving Ethan up there, locked in his room, was just as much killing him as she had the nerd in the street.
The power had not been lost, so the unbroken florescent lamps illuminated the horror around her as she picked her footing slowly. After some time, she finally navigated the fleshy gambit and entered the darkened hall just beyond reception. It was as though the scene displayed out there was intent on keeping people out of the hospital, like a warding of some sort, a gruesome standard that warned against trespass. Nevertheless, she was through and quickly left it behind.
The hospital had suffered the same aging dilapidation as the streets, landscaping, and facade outside. The tiled floor was filthy and debris-strewn, the walls stained and mold-grown, and the drop ceiling threatening to come down in more places than it already had. Through the center of the passage traveled many long and bloody streaks, as though someone dragged corpses through to the reception area. Shannon took the Glock from her pocket and let it hang at her side.
Ethan was on the second floor, and Shannon hoped it was just above her. She found a single utilitarian elevator in a small recess, the kind large enough to accommodate a wheeled gurney. She pushed the call button and felt the floor tremble slightly as the car went into motion. From deep inside the large building, she could hear the aged cables and pulleys screeching their protest. The sound was ominous and painfully loud. If the decorator of the lobby was still in the building, then now it certainly knew she was here as well.
The elevator car came to rest with a long, sighing hiss, and the doors parted. On the far side of the car, doors came open as well, revealing not only another passage but also an apparition of a hellish nightmare her mind was incapable of inventing. A large, overweight woman was standing some yards down the passage but staring right at Shannon. It was mostly nude, its nurse’s uniform torn almost completely away. What made it so horrible to see was that its skin had gone an ashy gray, and all over its body in random places, it had stitched severed limbs to herself, as if to add many arms and hands and other more revolting things to the nurse’s ample frame. Not even these displaced parts were the same sickly gray of the host, simply the bluish tinge of anatomy gone empty of blood.
In each of its real hands, it held tightly large surgical knives—not scalpels but long toothy bone saws. Its face was a twisted semblance of rage, each crevice or crease stitched into place with black nylon by a sloppy hand. Its mouth, the lips pulled back with rows of wide stitches, opened horribly, and it screamed rage at Shannon, a deep-seeded rage and blind contempt for the living.
Shannon screamed back.
The thing began to shamble towards her, the limbs stitched about bouncing and slapping lifelessly along her ruined body. Shannon screamed again, raised the gun, and started firing. If she had thought better of it, she would have run, but the heart-squeezing terror had been impossible to think through, and her inner voice shouted at her to destroy this wrongness, to rid the world of such a bald evil.
Her aim was sloppy and confused by the powerful bucking of the handgun. Her arm flailed up with each shot, jolting the bones in her hand, arm, shoulder, and neck. Nevertheless, she gave no ground to the thing’s advance nor did she stop firing. Soon the creature was too close to miss, and its body began to tear as each round passed
